Urban Umbrella design by Young Hwan Choi, with Andrés Cortés, AIA, and Sarrah Khan, PE, of Agencie Group.

URBAN UMBRELLA
Two years ago, the NYC Department of Buildings and AIA New York sponsored a design competition to develop an innovative solution for city scaffolding. This week, the winning team unveiled the prototype of the “urban umbrella.” The UrbanSHED competition asked designers to create better “sidewalk sheds” — the ubiquitous blue plywood and metal scaffolding structures seen around town. The winning design comes from Young-Hwan Choi with architect Andrés Cortés and engineer Sarrah Khan of New York-based Agencie Group, who won $25,000 for their efforts. This prototype was constructed by Brooklyn-based architecture and fabrication firm Caliper Studio. “Urban umbrellas” feature modular metal canopies, optimized to allow natural light to reach the sidewalk and designed for cost and structural integrity, that can be custom-installed to meet site dimensions. LED lights will light up the shed at night, which will make for a far safer pedestrian overhang. See a slideshow of the prototype at Inhabitat and read more on this from The Architect’s Newspaper.

Real estate holdings of key players in higher education

CAMPUS HOLDINGS
Mitchell Moss, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, wrote a compelling piece for The Architect’s Newspaper on recent development trends tied to hotspots of higher education in the city. Illustrated with this beautiful map, Moss points to the fact that the city’s colleges and universities are building up and out at a time when other development is in decline. He cites an incredible statistic: “There are twice as many people enrolled in degree programs in New York City than live in the entire city of Buffalo.” Using every planner’s tool in the box, from eminent domain, rezoning, leasing, trading air rights, public-private partnerships, strategic acquisitions, to contributing space for public purposes, campuses are expanding. The most notable expansions include an additional 6.8 million square feet to Columbia’s current 17-acre Manhattanville campus, an additional 396,000 square feet to CUNY’s 3 million square foot campus, and new buildings for SVA, the New School, and Cooper Union.

Parallel Networks, designed by Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada for Water as 6th Borough Competition

PARALLEL NETWORKS
As a challenge to envision “Water as the Sixth Borough of NYC,” the annual 2011 Terreform ONE prize asked designers to develop a vision for New York City’s future waterway use and to connect this idea with the upcoming Clean Tech World Expo. Designs focused on New York’s waterways, recreational space, transportation and local industry. The grand prize winners, Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada, titled their work “Parallel Networks,” and received $10,000 for their work. “Parallel Networks” features a flexible network of floating pods which function as islands for public space and habitat space, with renewable energy, water filtration and food production elements. The pods are easily moveable and adapt to their environment. The modular, add-on system can be grown to diverse scales or could start small, holding potential for adaptation to climate change and other factors. See the full winning design here, as well as other honorable mentions.

FOOD POLICY
New York City Council enacted five bills and several resolutions this week, intending to bring more locally produced food to city residents, schools and jails. The passed initiatives were largely distilled from Speaker Christine Quinn’s “FoodWorks New York,” the proposed comprehensive food system plan for New York City. According to Quinn, New York is the second largest institutional purchaser of food in the city, after the U.S. Department of Defense, which hints at the huge potential these efforts have to influence the region’s food market. Notable measures include: amending administrative code to encourage the purchasing of food grown and processed in New York State; Intro 338-A, which aims to make it easier to construct rooftop greenhouses; and Intro 615, which requires an annual report on the food system from City administration. For more on the benefits and challenges of the City Council’s legislation, take a look at this blog on food policy and this recent piece published in Gotham Gazette by Nevin Cohen, food policy expert and Professor at the New School (who also spoke with us last year about the Five Borough Farm project).

Growing produce in milk crates at Riverpark restaurant

POP-UP FARM IN MIDTOWN?
GOOD Magazine reported this week that a food-producing pop-up farm has been constructed east of the FDR drive in Midtown. The farm sits in the middle of what should have been the Alexandria Center, a bioscience complex that has since been stalled by its developer. Instead of letting the space go,  the developer has partnered with GrowNYC to grow fresh vegetables for Chef Tom Colicchio’s Riverpark restaurant. All the vegetables have been planted in removable milk crates for the time being, considering the site will likely be built out at some point in the future. New York City has more than 600 stalled construction sites and 596 acres of vacant public land. Could milk crate farms be the future for urban ag? See more at GOOD.is.

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Connected States of America | Image via MIT SENSEable City Lab

CONNECTED USA

A NEW BRAND OF BUSES
Transportation think tank EMBARQ has released “a creative guide to making public transport the way to go,” calling for a re-branding for public transit services in efforts to attract new users, retain existing riders and encourage government support. In a competitive marketplace in which the auto industry spends $21 billion on card ads annually, EMBARQ says creative marketing must be seen as an investment, not a luxury. The report highlights efforts of global public transportation administrations that have developed branded identities and boosted user-friendliness by increasing accessibility, streamlining design and using non-traditional language. Read more coverage on The Dirt or download the full guide here.

FOODPRINT L.A.
For our Los Angeles readers: Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich have just launched an experiment in crowdsourcing data collection to find out more about the food Angelenos eat and where it comes from. Every two weeks, volunteers will be asked to document their food purchases using Kullect‘s new app. The data collected will be used to create infographics, maps and charts to foster a better understanding of Los Angeles’ foodscape. The project is in anticipation of the next installment of the Foodprint Project, coming to L.A. this fall.

TreeHouse on Governors Island | Image via Inhabitat

GOVERNORS ISLAND TREEHOUSE
Artist Benjamin Jones has officially opened the Governors Island TreeHouse, built from all-sustainable materials that were sourced from non-profit reclaimed material warehouse Build-It-Green! NYC. The installation features a few interactive add-ons: games like an FSC See-Saw, a cell phone charging station, a Scratch N’ Sniff stand, and a greywater peddling fountain to teach visitors about sustainable energy sources. This weekend, Jones has invited the public to help paint the structure and enjoy a picnic party, on Saturday, July 9th. Read more about the TreeHouse on Inhabitat.

EVENTS AND TO DOs:

Fast-Tracked With CUP: Two years and two billion dollars from now, New York will get its first new subway stop in 22 years. Join CUP’s teaching artists Alexandra Woolsey-Puffer and Jeff Maki on July 12th at The Lot under the High Line at 30th Street for the debut presentation of Fast-Tracked, an investigation into how subways are developed, with particular attention paid to the hidden history of the 7 line extension and the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project. The program is free and open to the public. Find out more on the CUP Facebook page or RSVP to info@welcometocup.org.

Sarah Nelson Wright’s Oculus at Bring to Light Festival 2010 | Image via Sarah Nelson Wright and Nathaniel Lieb

Light Bright: Bring to Light has released a request for proposals for their second annual event. The festival fosters a new kind of engagement between temporary art installations and public space, “creating an immersive spectacle for thousands of visitors. … Whether boldly monumental or quietly engrossing, Bring to Light fosters contemplative, multi-sensory and participatory experiences in the public sphere with lasting impact.” The RFP invites artists at all stages of their careers to propose site-specific installations of light, sound, performance and projection to transform the streets, parks and industrial waterfront of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The RFP is open until July 25th.

Vertical Urban Factory Closing Reception: Next week is your last chance to see Vertical Urban Factory at the Skyscraper Museum, closing on July 17th. On July 13, from 6—8pm, architectural historian and exhibition curator Nina Rappaport will lead a gallery tour and discussion about the exhibit, followed by a closing party. Find out more at skyscraper.org.

Fixing the Great Mistake: Why have we let cars take over our streets? Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, noted entrepreneur and advocate for livable streets, will look at the history of transportation in New York City at the Center for Architecture next week. He will focus on unpacking some of the myths that are often cited to defend car-centric planning, providing evidence against them and offering a vision of livable streetlife in New York City.

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Paper Partition System | via Shigeru Ban Architects

LOW COST, HIGH SPEED SHELTERS
The Tokyo-based firm Shigeru Ban Architects (SBA), known for its ecologically sensitive, flexibly programmed structures, is seeking financial support for their effort to help victims displaced by the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. SBA plan to deploy simple, cardboard and paper partition shelters, originally designed for use after the 2005 Fukuoka earthquake, which provide privacy and separation for families in highly dense refugee camps and can be produced at low cost and high speed. Find out how to donate, and see photographs of SBA’s designs, on the firm’s website. (To learn more about Shigeru Ban’s work, watch the video of his Architectural League lecture in 2008 here.)
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PREFAB AT ATLANTIC YARDS
This week brought renewed controversy over the Atlantic Yards site, this time in prefab form. The New York Times reports that Forest City Ratner may erect a modular 34-story residential tower to meet low-income housing requirements at the site. Building modularly will save big on time and money, but at what cost? Activist group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn is particularly concerned with the loss of promised union jobs. Ratner plans to open its own factory for the production of modular pieces for construction, a move that DDDB calls “the latest casualty among Forest City Ratner’s endless string of cynical, empty, broken promises.” Modular construction has also been criticized on quality – this will be the tallest modular structure ever built, and questions have been raised on compromised appearance. Check out more coverage on Atlantic Yards Report and Brownstoner, who includes a clip from the soon-to-be-released documentary The Battle of Brooklyn from directors Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky on the use (and abuse?) of eminent domain at Atlantic Yards.
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NYU AMENDS PLAN FOR EXPANSION
NYU has re-released plans to expand its campus into Greenwich Village as two reconfigured super-blocks — part of which includes a 14-story dorm atop a public school (currently a grocery store). WNYC reports that the plan now requires the relocation of the grocery store, a popular dog-run and a sports facility. Although NYU promises to provide benefits to the community (such as an increase in neighborhood open and green space), the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation remains opposed to the changed plan. Decide for yourself: a standing display of the new plan will be on view Tuesdays through Sundays, starting next week, at NYU’s Open House space (528 LaGuardia Place).
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Through the Lens of Food | via MAS Context

MAS CONTEXT
MAS Context is a quarterly online journal created by architecture and urban design firm MAS Studio to address issues “that affect the urban context,” and does a great job of doing just that. The most recent issue focuses on networks, “whether physical or virtual, formal and informal, to understand their possibilities and power in our lives,” and includes essays on everything from physical infrastructure to media and information to genealogy and mediation. Check out the full issue here, and be sure to read the interview with Foodprint Project founders Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, familiar to Omnibus readers from Food and the Shape of Cities and Foodprint City, which furthers the discourse on how the relationship between food and the built environment interacts with and molds our experience of urban life.
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VISION2020
Vision2020, NYC’s comprehensive waterfront plan, was released by the Department of City Planning in complete form on March 14th. The plan outlines a 10-year vision for the future of the City’s 520 miles of shoreline, promoted by the Bloomberg administration as the city’s “sixth borough.” The document covers expanding the waterfront for recreation, supporting the working waterfront and coordinating governance over waterways. Stay tuned for more coverage of the plan on Urban Omnibus, coming soon.
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Indra's Cloud, 2008 by Anne Percoco | via Water Water Every Where at BRIC

TO DO: EVENTS AND VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES
Richard Sennett, urbanist, author and professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics (and the Omnibus’ very first “Walk and Talk”), will speak at 6pm on Monday, April 11th at the City College of New York on “The Edge: Borders and Boundaries in the City.” As a social analyst, Sennett has explored the relationship between cityscape and subjective experience — drawing on ethnography and interviews to contextualize his findings.

Explore the boundaries of  plastic in architecture, engineering and materials science at the fourth of the glass, concrete, metal, plastic and light conference on architecture, engineering and materials. “Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering” will take place March 30 – April 1 at Columbia University.

“Water Water Every Where” is now on view at BRIC Arts | Media | Brooklyn, an exhibition featuring the work of seven artists, six based in New York, all exploring “water’s inextricable presence in our lives.” The show is curated by Elizabeth Ferrer, who aims to push back against what she sees as the typical New Yorker’s tendency “to look inward (and indeed, upwards) when imagining the contours of the city.” The show will be up through Saturday April 30th on 33 Clinton Street in Brooklyn.

For the urban agriculturists out there, check out Battery Conservancy’s call for volunteers to create an urban farm in Battery Park, every day next week, March 21-25, 9-5pm. Contact urbanfarm@thebattery.org for more information.

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Give a Minute NYC | via Co.Design

STATE OF THE CITY
Mayor Bloomberg delivered the State of the City address on Wednesday. His focus was on neighborhood specific issues, including various changes ranging from livery cab policies to urban technology innovations. “Transformation” — economic, technological, physical, social, and otherwise — and “simplicity” were the words of the day. The Staten Island Navy Homeport, Governors Island, the Narrows at Coney Island, Steeplechase Plaza, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hunters Point South, Willets Point, Hunts Point Landing and the development of ferry service were some of the large-scale projects that received specific mention. The Simplicity Plan promises to modernize City government by “making it smarter, more efficient and oriented around customers” — an effort that includes the launch of Give A Minute for New York City. You might remember that we interviewed the minds behind Give a Minute in December, learning about the processes of sharing our concerns for a more sustainable urban environment. The New York version of Give A Minute promises to offer a platform to share ideas as well as a connection with various city departments that share your concerns, thus “redefining public participation for the 21st century.” The official program launch is pegged for April or May, so start thinking of your ideas!
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POWERLESS IN BROOKLYN
In a biting essay in the New York Times Complaint Box, Atlantic Yards Report blogger Norman Oder decries the lack of local government and local media in the “non-Manhattan” boroughs. Primarily addressing Brooklyn, Oder asserts that the absence of daily borough-wide newspapers and a concentration of city agencies in Manhattan render the other boroughs powerless, resulting in muted citizen voices. His piece inspired debate and commiseration from Brooklynites and other New Yorkers. If you have something to say on the issue weigh in here.
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THE BLUEBELT AND BEYOND
Next Tuesday, January 25th, Dana Gumb will share his Bluebelt model for sustainable urban stormwater management at the Arsenal in Central Park as part of the Freshkills Park Talks series. The long-time leader of the Staten Island Bluebelt project (which you can read about in this recent Omnibus feature), Gumb will discuss how his experience with stormwater management on Staten Island has translated into current DEP projects in Queens and the Bronx and the potential for future open space and water reclamation in the city. The talk is free and open to the public.
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NEWTON CREEK NATURE WALK EXPANDS
Regular readers of the Omnibus know that we are big fans of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, so we’re pleased to see plans for an expansion of the project. New city funding is being directed towards a near-doubling of the path, which has been open since October 2007. However, we were not so pleased to hear that George Trakas has not been hired to design the second phase, which is instead being planned by the DDC. WTF?
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Conductor (In progress demo) from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

A PLAY ON THE SUBWAY MAP
Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 subway map design has inspired praise, criticism and now music. Alexander Chen’s “Conductor” transforms the map into a musical instrument with each line as a different string synched to video visualizations. The work is still in progress, and we can’t wait until we can play the map ourselves, but for now these beautiful videos are diversion enough.
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FOOD FOR THINKERS
Much like cities, the roots of food politics extend into myriad conversations, from history to sustainability to class and to architecture. To reinforce the complexity of conversations about food, Nicola Twilley has been hosting Food For Thinkers, “an online festival of food and writing” that invites thinkers, writers and bloggers to write about food from different areas of expertise. The festival continues through the 23rd, and all of the links are being collected at GOOD magazine’s Food hub, so tune in to read about edible architecture, the classist geography of restaurant reviews or food as a public space editor — and check out Urban Omnibus’ contribution, our interview with Nevin Cohen of the Five Borough Farm project.
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Imagined transportation for the sixth borough | Image via One Prize

THE SIXTH BOROUGH
As Bloomberg talks about the state of the City’s five boroughs, the One Prize committee is envisioning a sixth. “Water as the Sixth Borough” is a concept that’s been popping up in a few different contexts lately, and now “architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, economists, artists, students, and individuals” are being asked to envision ways to incorporate New York City’s waterways into the urban structure. Registration is open until April 30 for the annual design and science award, which aims to promote green design in cities, and the full competition brief is available for download on the One Prize website. For anyone interested in entering the competition, BLDGBLOG offers some suggested reading to help imagine such a “liquid neighborhood” for the future.

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Five Borough Farm is a project of the Design Trust for Public Space, in partnership with Added Value, to create the first citywide, comprehensive urban agriculture plan for New York City. Over the course of this year, the Five Borough Farm team will be evaluating the city’s existing urban agriculture activity, establishing a set of metrics by which to quantify the benefits of urban agriculture and creating policy recommendations for relevant city agencies. The project officially kicked off in December with a half-day workshop that tapped the minds and expertise of 90 urban farmers and urban agriculture advocates. Two people have been selected by the Design Trust to lead the effort: Nevin Cohen and Rupal Sanghvi. Sanghvi, who specializes in program evaluation and public health, is the project’s Metrics Fellow and therefore is responsible for quantifying and measuring the impact of urban agriculture on the city and its residents. Nevin Cohen, an urban food policy expert and chair of Environmental Studies at the New School, is the Policy Fellow, which makes him responsible for surveying the existing urban agriculture landscape in New York City and identifying new opportunities and recommendations.

We recently had an opportunity to talk with Nevin Cohen about Five Borough Farm. Read on to hear Cohen explain the challenges of developing a unified city plan for urban agriculture and talk about its promise as both social justice movement and model for community development. -V.S.

Five Borough Farm | Graphic by Manuel Miranda | Click image to enlarge

Urban Omnibus: What is the Five Borough Farm Project?
Nevin Cohen: Five Borough Farm is a project by the Design Trust for Public Space and Added Value, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that operates one of the city’s largest farms, to create a citywide plan to support urban agriculture in New York City. The urban agriculture movement is booming here: demand for local food production is growing, and in every corner of the city New Yorkers are developing a broad range of community gardens, rooftop farms, composting projects, and farmers markets. But right now no one has a detailed understanding of all of these activities, or hard data or tools to evaluate the benefits of agriculture as an urban land use. So what you find is city officials are reluctant to adopt the many policy recommendations advanced by advocates, or to address local food production on a citywide scale. Often city agencies and the ever-growing number of practitioners – many of whom operate on city land – work largely in isolation, lacking the systemic resources to coordinate or scale-up their efforts. There are outstanding groups like the NYC Community Gardening Coalition and NGOs like Just Food but there isn’t yet an overall vision for how urban agriculture could really transform New York.

The benefits are about more than just the quantity of food that can be grown. Urban agriculture is a social justice movement.The Design Trust is engaging a diverse cross-section of experts and a network of hundreds of individual practitioners to move this project forward. Based on a detailed analysis of the city’s current urban agricultural landscape, we will develop an evaluation framework to measure, in quantifiable and replicable terms, the ecological, social, and economic value urban agriculture brings to the communities it serves and to the city as a whole. Together with Added Value and many other stakeholders, the Design Trust will help city government evaluate what their role should be, and identify specific opportunities for agencies to support urban agricultural activity. The project will also create an interactive website to allow everyone involved with urban agriculture (including practitioners, policymakers, and supporters) to use the project’s tools and findings and share their own expertise.

What is your role as Policy Fellow and Rupal Sanghvi’s as Metrics Fellow?
Rupal Sanghvi and I are working closely together on all aspects of the project. We’re examining what kinds of urban agriculture New Yorkers are practicing now, including the work of advocacy and other supporting organizations, by conducting in-depth interviews with people in all five boroughs, from relatively large-scale operations to individual community gardens, commercial farms to nonprofits.

My work focuses on the policy landscape of urban agriculture. I’ve been conducting case study research in other large North American cities — Detroit, Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco — to uncover best practices in urban agriculture policy that might be adopted by New York. Over the course of the project, I will evaluate existing New York City-based and national urban agriculture initiatives (e.g. schoolyard farms, urban farming plots on New York City Housing Authority grounds) and policy recommendations advanced by urban agriculture advocates, and will work with New York City policy makers to identify realistic measures that would support urban agriculture citywide.

Rupal Sanghvi has been focusing on developing reliable metrics that can help practitioners to achieve their goals while also providing data on the diverse impacts of urban agriculture on individuals and communities. When the project is complete we will have a set of indicators that address ecology (e.g., the ability of gardens to capture stormwater that would otherwise overburden sewage treatment plants) and stewardship; public health (improved access to fresh vegetables); education and youth empowerment (changes in behavior and academic achievement); community building (residents’ use of a garden as a public meeting space); and economics (revenue from food sales, job creation in ancillary food businesses).

Together, we will be creating a shared evaluative framework and tools that can help practitioners and guide both legislation and on-the-ground programming.

But this is really a multidisciplinary effort. In addition to the Design Trust, Added Value, Rupal Sanghvi and myself, the team includes Thread Collective, an architecture and design firm, post-doctoral fellow Kristin Reynolds, and an advisory committee of experts in urban agriculture, planning, and policy. And we are working in parallel with researchers at Columbia University who are estimating the productive capacity of New York City’s open space.

Also, students at The New School have helped gather data on urban agriculture activity in New York City. (My students mapped this information as part of an urban agriculture exhibition I co-curated at The New School with my colleague Radhika Subramaniam, called Living Concrete/Carrot City.)

Students mapping urban agriculture sites for Five Borough Farm project at The New School's Living Concrete/Carrot City exhibition | Photo by Nevin Cohen

Tell us about the workshop that kicked off the project. Who participated? What was discussed?
In December, we convened a citywide workshop for growers, advocates, and funders to discuss the project and to learn how practitioners measure their success, what information would help them to carry out their work more successfully, and the types of policy changes that would enable urban agriculture to expand in New York City. We asked: Why do you do what you do? What resources (revenue, volunteers, funding, etc.) do you rely on in order to do your work? How do you track what you do, and what do you wish you could track? What would help you measure the benefits of what you do?

Right now, we’re reviewing hundreds of pages of transcripts from all of the small group sessions we held. But I can tell you one thing we heard over and over that day: practitioners want a better way to communicate with each other, whether it’s sharing information about resources (where can I get these tools this week?) or technical assistance (we’re starting a farm-based learning program in the fall at a local elementary school and want some tips on monitoring the students’ progress). I think that’s where the tools and the website for Five Borough Farm will be really useful to people.

Urban agriculture engages people in initiatives to strengthen and improve the social, ecological, and economic well-being of their communities and, by extension, the city as a whole.It’s clear that the complexity of urban agriculture extends far beyond the prevalent images of rooftop gardens and community plots. Questions of land use, community engagement, city policy, ecological effects and farming expertise, among others, all have to be addressed. What activities fall under the scope of Five Borough Farm? How much of this is about growing and how much is about distribution and access to healthy food? How much is about something else entirely?
That complexity is precisely why we are engaging so many practitioners and advocates in the process. For many urban farmers and gardeners, food access is their main objective: it’s about the fresh kale and tomatoes they grow and the weekly eggs they harvest, for themselves and others in their community. But urban agriculture is about far more than that. Urban agriculture engages people citywide in initiatives to strengthen and improve the social, ecological, and economic well-being of their communities and, by extension, the city as a whole. The scope of Five Borough Farm includes the youth leadership programs, school-based curricula, entrepreneurial rooftop farms, and related infrastructure – from composting projects to farmstands – that make urban agriculture such a powerful, multidimensional movement. The urban agriculture system — and it really needs to be addressed as a system — is a promising model of community development that has the potential to improve many aspects of urban life.

What are your ultimate goals for this project?
I hope that the tools we develop to measure the benefits of urban agriculture will enable gardeners and farmers to more effectively achieve their goals, whether it’s more sustainable food production, youth development, more revenue, or better health for the people in their neighborhood. We expect that reliable indicators of the impact of urban agriculture will also provide evidence to policymakers that urban agriculture is an important part of urban sustainability and should be supported like other municipal infrastructure. A broader goal is to influence City policy so that zoning, local laws, funding decisions, and City programs support the growth of urban food production.

What are the food security issues that urban agriculture can realistically address on a coordinated, large scale?
About three million New Yorkers live in neighborhoods with few or no grocery stores and supermarkets. These residents spend more of their limited income at bodegas and convenience stores for a narrow selection of poor quality food. While urban farms and community gardens are no substitute for full-service grocers, local food production can supplement the food budgets of low-income New Yorkers and enable people to eat healthier meals. A recent study in Philadelphia found that community gardeners in that city produced $4.9 million worth of summer vegetables alone, not including spring and fall plantings or fruits and berries. For low income New Yorkers, the ability to grow fresh, healthy food in the spring, summer and fall can be a godsend.

Five Borough Farm | Graphic by Manuel Miranda | Click image to enlarge

What land availability does New York City have for urban agriculture use? What kind of supply and distribution can be achieved?
Our colleagues at Columbia University are evaluating the productive capacity of open space in New York City to estimate how much food could be grown in the five boroughs. New York City doesn’t have vast unused tracts of land, but we do have quite a bit of open space, including rooftops and some 52,000 acres of yard space. If we gardened just 10% of our yards we could grow enough vegetables to feed 650,000 New Yorkers. One of the key design challenges is how to weave together these small patches of urban farmland to achieve a large impact. BK Farmyards (in Brooklyn) has given this a lot of thought, as have entrepreneurs in many other cities.

But the benefits are about more than just the quantity of food that can be grown. Community gardens make neighborhoods more livable, and also increase property values. Innovative entrepreneurial urban farms create jobs and make underused spaces safe and productive. Non-profit urban agriculture projects teach young people about ecology, food and nutrition, and help build skills and confidence. Productive green spaces keep rainwater out of our sewer system, reduce the urban heat island effect, and recycle organic matter. The impacts are far-reaching — as many practitioners will tell you, urban agriculture is a social justice movement.

What can the City itself do to promote or support an urban agriculture system?
People are already discussing policies about long-term stability for existing urban farmers, the use of vacant and under-used land and rooftops for new farms, municipal composting of organic waste for city gardens, and financial and technical support for urban farm projects that provide substantial social, economic and environmental benefits.

Several months ago, the departments of Parks and Recreation and Housing Preservation and Development issued new rules governing the use of city-owned sites for urban gardens. These were the subject of public hearings and extensive participation by community gardeners, and resulted in the proposed rules being modified. In addition, the City Council’s FoodWorks plan recommends policies to ensure the stability of community gardens, as did Scott Stringer’s FoodNYC. The specific local laws to put the ideas in FoodWorks into effect will be developed and introduced in the coming year or so.

What are the barriers? What can the City do to overcome them?
Policymakers need evidence of urban agriculture’s impacts to move public policy forward — especially in this economy. That’s why the metrics we are developing will be so important. It will help people see the tremendous value of each community garden or small urban farm in more than anecdotal ways. At the same time, we also need a broad understanding of urban agriculture in New York City and how it can best fit into the City’s food system. With this big picture view, people will understand the cumulative impact of hundreds — and potentially thousands — of those small community gardens and farms.

In terms of practical barriers, limited access to land, clean soil, skilled gardeners and farmers, technical expertise and efficient distribution channels all pose challenges. Our research is identifying which are most important and to what extent these limitations restrict urban agriculture’s potential. Like their rural counterparts, urban farmers are able to overcome many obstacles, and the wide range of urban gardens and farms is evidence of this, but the right public policies and targeted support could really scale up the movement.

Five Borough Farm Workshop, December 2010 | Photo by Dan Honey

How does a scaled-up, systematized urban agriculture network accommodate different farming models?
The key is to recognize that urban agriculture is a true polyculture. It ranges from window boxes and planters to multi-acre farms that grow many different crops. The efforts can be led by individuals, non-profits, or public and private institutions, like schools or hospitals. Cities can accommodate the entire spectrum of food production by removing unnecessary barriers and supporting the infrastructure to make diversified food production feasible. This might mean expanding programs to enable the produce from school gardens to be incorporated into school meals, or providing funding for commercial kitchen incubators so that food producers can add value to the food they grow.

The model that is most problematic is the vertical farm. It is highly capital intensive, and material- and energy-intensive as well. Fanciful schemes of high rises filled with tomato plants and pigs just doesn’t make sense from an economic, environmental or social perspective.

Does a city-wide plan call for a market-based system of farming? A more cooperative one? One that is reliant on volunteer networks? All of the above?
My sense is that the most vibrant urban agriculture system will be a civic agriculture system, to use a phrase coined by the late rural sociologist Tom Lyson. It will involve pure for-profit farms that are embedded in their communities, neighborhood-based community gardens run by volunteers, and hybrids — for-profit farms that rely at critical moments on “Crop Mobs” for extra labor, and non-profits that teach young people how to make a buck growing and selling fresh produce.

What’s next for Five Borough Farm?
Within the next few weeks, the Design Trust will release a workshop summary. By March, we’ll have completed about twenty-five in-depth interviews. Our whole team will be working on synthesizing and sharing this information with people in the urban agriculture community. We’re talking to photographers and graphic designers about how to visualize our findings, and we’ll have more events like the December workshop. Ultimately, we’ll end up with a Five Borough Farm publication and a website that we hope people will start using for their projects all over the city.
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Nevin Cohen is Chair of Environmental Studies at The New School, where he teaches courses in urban planning and food systems.  Dr. Cohen’s current research focuses on urban food policy, particularly innovative planning strategies to support food production in the urban and peri-urban landscape, public policies to engage citizens in sustainable food production, urban planning and food access, and civic agriculture in cities and suburbs. He has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Rutgers University, a Masters in City and Regional Planning from Berkeley, and a BA from Cornell.

Happy Thanksgiving! Instead of our usual Wednesday feature, today we bring you an early edition of the weekly roundup — including, with holiday-appropriate thanks to all of the designers, writers, artists, activists, scholars, planners, architects and citizens who have contributed their words and ideas to Urban Omnibus, a look back at some of our recent features and forum posts. First up, some news:
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FOODWORKS
This week, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn released FoodWorks, a “ground-to-garbage” plan for the future of the City’s food system. The document lays out goals, strategies and 59 policy proposals for the coming months and years, clustered under five phases: “Agricultural Production,” “Processing,” “Distribution,” “Consumption” and “Post-Consumption.” Asserting that “the very system that is meant to sustain and nourish us imposes costs to our health, our economy, and our environment,” Quinn’s plan presents itself as both blueprint for local action and potential model of food systems change for other cities. The report lists consultants ranging from farmers to chefs to government agencies to environmental and hunger advocates. This isn’t the first proposal for a more sustainable food system New York has seen this year — in February, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer released FoodNYC, an effort to reform City policies around food production and distribution that came out of the NYC Food & Climate Summit held last December by NYU and Just Food. Meanwhile, Gotham Gazette offers a rundown of non-government organizations dedicated to expanding access to healthy food in today’s “Low-Income Locavores.” It’s clear that our food system and its shortcomings have captured the City’s attention. Let’s see what changes are implemented as a result.
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Bike Share, Taipei | Photo by Flickr user richardmasoner.

LEARN TO SHARE AND DON’T BE A JERK
The NYC Department of Transportation released a call for proposals this week to potential developers of a new bike-share program, slated for launch in spring 2012. The program would be privately funded and run, according to DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, though revenues will be shared with the City. Ben Fried and Noah Kazis at Streetsblog each highlight details from the RFP, including information about payment, memberships, station placement, system data (which will be owned by the DOT), advertising and the bicycles themselves. The Post calls it “Zipcar on two wheels,” referencing the proposed electronic card membership system that will track cyclists’ usage of the bikes (the first 30 minutes will be free for members). Matt Chaban at the Observer warns New York against directing the program towards tourists rather than city residents, a mistake he says contributed to the struggles of bike-share programs in DC and Chicago. Meanwhile, in response to the oft-referenced tension between city drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, the DOT is about to release a bike etiquette awareness campaign titled, bluntly, “Don’t Be a Jerk.” Though we fully support the sentiment behind the media campaign, we wonder why it is limited to the cyclists alone. There are plenty of ill-mannered drivers and pedestrians who could use a little schooling too…
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RECENTLY ON THE OMNIBUS
For those of you that are using the holiday weekend to catch up on some reading, we thought we’d suggest a few features and forum posts that you may have missed in the past few weeks:

Genevieve Sherman’s report, “GSD Throwdown: Battle for the Intellectual Territory of a Sustainable Urbanism,” on the recent debate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design over New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism, has sparked a spirited discussion in the comments that is still going strong. Check it out here and chime in, and then take a look at Rob Holme’s thoughts on Pierre Bélanger’s arguments over on mammoth, and Jason King’s response, “Parsley on Buildings,” on Landscape+Urbanism.

The seventh installment of our series On Criticism went up this week, written by Diana Lind in response to the recent Blueprint Magazine/BLDGBLOG “kerfuffle” over the direction and substance of architectural criticism. Over on Design Observer, Alexandra Lange continued the discussion while also surfacing some of her and others’ past writing on the topic, such as Lange’s “Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough” and Shannon Christina Mattern’s Words in Space piece “Puffery and Critique in the ‘Other Spaces’ of Architectural Discourse.”

That’s just a start. In recent months, we’ve also brought you interviews with Tamara Greenfield and Caron Atlas about naturally occurring cultural districts (followed up by Purva Jain’s “Design a city for culture or let culture design a city?“); with photographer Stanley Greenberg about the hidden systems of the city; with Underdome creators Janette Kim and Erik Carver discussing their ambitious project to classify contending energy agendas; and with interaction designers Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch, who have developed a curriculum for high school students using the city itself as a classroom.

Urban designer Kaja Kühl presented a field guide to phytoremediation; Haruka Joriuchi and Frank Hebbert told us about Tektonomastics, their effort to map all of the residential buildings in New York that have proper names; and Laura Forlano taught us about Service Design.

In our Forum, Zhenya Merkulova and Paul Gates asked why we are “Forever Trapped Between Jacobs and Moses;” ad Vishaan Chakrabarti considered the implications of the cancellation of the ARC Tunnel project as part of his ongoing opinion series “A Country of Cities.” Also, take a look back at exhibition reviews, from Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway to Living Concrete/Carrot City; and live event recaps from the Creative Time Summit, the Rising Current Postscript, a conversation on Cities between Lewis Lapham, Robert Krulwich, Andrew Dolkart and Jeffrey Inaba, and one on global waste streams between Manuel Mansylla and Dennis Maher.
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THANKS!
Happy Thanksgiving from the Omnibus team to all of our readers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, email subscribers and collaborators. Have a wonderful holiday weekend!

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Addressing and defining change and measurable progress often seems like the end result of a project or political campaign, rather than the starting point it ought to be. Last weekend, Creative Time, that hyper-dynamic creative engine for public art and its potential in New York (and increasingly elsewhere), held its second annual summit, a two-day conference in New York City, and succeeded in presenting a concrete conversation about design for change that went beyond the clichés to engage systemic approaches to political challenges.

In his opening remarks, Nato Thompson, the chief curator of Creative Time and of the summit, summed it up well with a quote from artist Tania Bruguera: “I don’t want art that points at the thing. I want art that is the thing.” Thompson emphasized the growing importance of cultural production beyond any perceived isolated world of art. He reminded us that now “the cultural landscape is the political landscape…and this makes culture producers extraordinarily relevant in society.” If it were not as apparent before, now it is glaringly obvious that people vote based on their cultural affiliations, making cultural production at the forefront of politics, across the spectrum.

2010 Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change recipient Rick Lowe

This year’s choice for the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change captures the approach of this year’s summit perfectly. Rick Lowe received the prize for his Project Row Houses, a far-ranging, community-based architectural and artistic project that aims to create sustainable dignity and culture-led potential within Houston’s Third Ward. As the project nears its third decade, its scope of commitment and practical yet inspired vision continues to typify the kind of contextualized public interest creative practice that this summit seems to exalt. The topics and projects ranged from the architecture of conflict to prison systems to artistic interventions in agriculture. And the old clichés that the personal is political, the local is global and, increasingly, that the cultural is political, were made plain.

Claire Pentecost, Art Institute of Chicago

In her presentation on food, Claire Pentecost of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose work investigates divisions of knowledge (for example, nature and artificiality), may have best articulated the necessary scope for a committed and systematic approach to change in the 21st century. She marvels at the deeply entrenched separation between man and nature and how this has led to, among other perverse dynamics, the lack of complex thinking about eating, which is, she reminds us, “our most intimate experience of the natural world.” Of course she is greatly encouraged by the progress of the last decade, in which complex thinking about eating has indeed gained traction, perhaps permanently. While many see this as merely a trend, she strongly believes it is a movement, a “long-brewing, popular response to deep structural conditions that degrade life across the board. As an issue, food is entangled with a host of other problems and possible solutions, from health care to climate change, from class to wildlife, from energy to sovereignty. Food is so cultural and certainly our ecological and political solutions are ultimately cultural.”

Lest anyone dismiss this movement as an expensive bourgeois flight of fancy, Pentecost listed a number of examples that show otherwise, including Detroit, “the capital of a failed paradigm” that also presents the largest urban farming network in the country. Other examples abound – Milwaukee, Oakland and many other places around the globe, including in India and Mexico, where it is indeed a movement, and one necessary for survival. But Pentecost appreciates the need to further bridge the gap between “what may be perceived for some as an elective desire for change [and] the work of those who are fighting for their lives.”

The other artists on the “Food” panel also presented deeply integrated projects that illustrate the prime importance the production and distribution of food has in almost every facet of life.  Amy Franceschini’s urban gardens, one of which was in front of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, consciously echo and draw upon such historical precedence for urban gardening as the government-promoted Victory Gardens of WWII, when one propaganda poster read “Victory Gardens March On To Freedom.”

Wheatfield — A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 1982. Commissioned by Public Art Fund | © 1982 Agnes Denes

Agnes Denes, an environmental land artist who can easily silence any murmurings about the aesthetic value of activist art, spoke about the need to address our existence as the first species that can control its own evolution. Her work has always integrated science and art, and many other fields that these two seemingly disparate disciplines subsume. Perhaps her most famous urban intervention was the beautiful wheat field she planted in Battery Park in 1982.  She made skyscrapers, golden wheat and a surrounding harbor all seem a wonderful accident of nature. She is presently involved with a 25-year master plan in Holland that aims to string together a 100-kilometer-long series of forts while implementing an extensive system of water and flood management, an example of how her work has evolved towards more committed interventions that aim to change a space permanently, but still just as beautifully.

Eyal Weizman, Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London

A closer investigation of the role of the transformation of geography itself was presented by Eyal Weizman, the director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a member of the architectural research project Decolonizing Architecture. Weizman posits that the power of geography is not in its fixity but in its transformation. He sees space as something that “…goes through continuous transformation. That within that transformation lies its power, its oppressive power, but also its potential.” He speaks of a “political plastic” to describe the powerful potential of the elasticity of space. In more concrete terms, Weizman illustrated this notion by explaining that “In the West Bank, it is not only the fact of where military bases, roads, settlements, bridges are built, but the fact of constant transformation…its unpredictability that has actually become the mechanism for control.” An impetus for his project was Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and the very real physical and geographical dilemmas faced by Palestinians who had to inhabit the physical space of their recently departed enemy. While Israel/Palestine is in many ways a unique area of geographical conflict where land, space and structure carry special historical burdens, this work translates into any area of conflict, minor or major.  It is also, as Weizman points out, a way of entering the political process in a different way: from the ground up, so to speak.

Claire Doherty, curator, writer, and educator

Of the six regional reports about revolutions in public practice elsewhere in the world, Claire Doherty’s presentation about the use of public space in the UK, especially in light of the 2012 Olympics, resonated most. Doherty, a curator from Bristol, led the audience through a series of projects investigating the use of public space. At one end was the use of Trafalgar Square – the place of near-hysteric populist joy at the awarding of the 2012 Olympics and where Antony Gormley held his Fourth Plinth experiment, in which a total of 2,400 volunteers occupied a plinth over 100 days. Doherty described the experiment as “false democracy at its worst…the experience of watching the participants was akin to an excruciating episode of Big Brother.” She provided examples of projects that better feed the public’s very real need for shared cultural experiences, public art projects with long durations, such as the Liverpool Biennial, Grizedale, and Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland, a fascinating ongoing project in direct response to the 2012 Olympics. Nowhereisland is a micro-nation created by Hartley on an island that emerged from the melting ice of a retreating glacier near the North Pole. Hartley discovered this island while on an Arctic expedition in 2004 and will be sailing a scaled version along English shores during the Olympics. As Doherty described it, “This is our Cultural Olympiad — a riposte to the monolithic intervention in public space with an epic endeavor and call upon public time to become citizens of this new micro-nation — to imagine what laws and rules this landmass might accrue on its slow journey.”

Laura Kurgan, Spatial Information Design Lab

A project with more direct implications for New York and other urban centers was presented by Laura Kurgan, the co-director of the Spatial Information Design Lab in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia. For the past five years, Kurgan has been working on a project called Architecture and Justice, which was first exhibited at the Architectural League and is also part of MoMA’s permanent collection. Architecture and Justice used criminal justice statistics from courts in multiple American cities to literally map out the geography of incarceration and return. Kurgan and her team analyzed the home addresses of the incarcerated (the vast majority of whom are non-violent felons sentenced to 1-3 years) to visualize what they refer to as “Million Dollar Blocks,” so called because of the millions of dollars spent annually on incarcerating individuals from certain individual census blocks in places like East New York and the South Bronx. By illustrating the incarceration and return rate of these “million dollar blocks,” Kurgan offers an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between poverty and incarceration and the seemingly squandered opportunity to use that money more efficiently and effectively.

Million Dollar Blocks | Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center

Kurgan has recently put those maps to use in a project in New Orleans, Louisiana, the state with the highest rate of incarceration in the country, and therefore in the world. An analysis of the Central City neighborhood revealed a rather disturbing portrait of a once-vibrant center both stricken by Hurricane Katrina and bisected by a newly-constructed highway. Using the resources and funding pouring into New Orleans after Katrina, Kurgan and her team were able to identify community groups and non-profits working separately in the area and help bring those groups together to implement several very effective projects. At present, Kurgan is working with New York’s Department of Probation to relocate Brooklyn’s central probation office. The office is currently in Brooklyn Heights, many miles and socio-economic levels away from the eastern reaches of Brooklyn where most offenders reside.

As Clare Pentecost emphasized, “We might say that the very concept of better living is what we are in the process of changing. To know how to live and soon how to coexist, it is not possible to be living well if others are living badly or if nature is damaged. To live well means to understand the deterioration of a species is the deterioration of all.”

While it is easy to dismiss some utopian visions for change as just that — utopian — the acceptance of a shared fate and the understanding of the systematic underpinnings that must be addressed are not easy to dismiss at all. The Creative Time Summit succeeded in both explaining this and providing viable models that make it real and provide clues to a more sustainable future.

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Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homely beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The Red Hook Food Vendors have been cooking up Latin American specialties since 1974 at Red Hook Park in Brooklyn. It has been a longstanding tradition for food lovers to go enjoy delicious cuisine while watching fútbol games at the adjacent field. In 2008, the Vendors were issued a six-year permit for the continuation of the market (they had been working on temporary permits since their inception). As a result, the temporary food trucks that were necessary to comply with health codes were too expensive for vendors. So, in an effort to install a more permanent marketplace to the site, vendors teamed up with Architecture for Humanity to organize a Call for Ideas. The competition called for permanent spaces, maintaining compliance with the Department of Health, allowing for vendors to set up cooking venues that simultaneously enliven the surrounding environment. Architecture for Humanity “hosted this competition to start a conversation about what it will take to regenerate the vitality of the market space that the vendors originally created.”

Photos showing the past and present Red Hook Food Vendors

On Saturday, September 18, an exhibition celebrating the Red Hook Food Vendors opened at the Queens Museum of Art, which showcases the spirit and liveliness so often associated with the Vendors. It was a festive affair, with a DJ and a selection of food from the local vendors. The show displays photography from the Red Hook community photo project, What’s the Hook?, and proposals for a new marketplace at Red Hook Park from the Architecture for Humanity competition. All of the entries are exhibited, but the four finalists have drawings and models to showcase their submissions. If you visit the exhibit before the closing on October 3rd, you can provide input for the various schemes by putting your thoughts on sticky notes and placing them next to the entries. Here is a brief introduction to the finalists:

	Food Fence by Mateo Pinto & Carolina Cisneros This proposal focuses on civic activities and public spaces “reshaping progressively over time to address the growing needs of vendor and vicinity.” It utilizes existing fence systems to create boundaries for various services and activities, while framing the vendor stalls around the perimeter of the ball fields.
	Food Coloring by Asaf Yogev & Craig Tooman Taking inspiration from the local industry and history of the site, Food Coloring uses recycled shipping containers as permanent food stalls. It provides a frame for the soccer fields and the flexibility of additional seating during the off-season. They use different colored containers to categorize based on food type or origin of the cuisine, allowing visitors to easily identify the food that they are looking for.
	Double Sided by Emilie Graham This design utilizes a covered hall with connecting bleachers to provide seating for ball games at the adjacent field. The hall also serves as a gathering place for community members and can be transformed into exhibition space for local artists during the off-season.
	New Vendor Kiosk by Jackie Luk The Vendor Kiosks are folly-esque structures that serve as bright, eye-catching sculptures (as well as excess seating) when not in use. They utilize inexpensive material, manual cross ventilation to cut down on expensive exhaust systems, and rainwater collection systems.

The projects represent a diverse range of contributions from a global audience (one finalist had flown in from France!). The models and drawings are helpful in envisioning how the surrounding space would be affected by the structures and they invite viewers to share their thoughts in the interactive polling techniques – a fun way for everyone to contribute to the community’s growth.

Red Hook Food Vendors is on view at the Queens Museum of Art through October 3rd, 2010.

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Meredith Baber is a Project Associate at Urban Omnibus and a Masters candidate in the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture Program at Columbia University’s GSAPP.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.